The Aether Problem

[HyperiusUltima]

So, as we all know, Aether has been THE place to gather for anything regarding content in FFXIV - from ranging between Crafting and Gathering, it's been practically the only place where content that isn't MSQ is done. Alliance Raids, Raids in general, and most importantly, EX/Savage/Ultimate.

While yes, it was branded the raiding DC for a long time by NA, the community has decided that with the advent of DC travel that everyone go to Aether for any challenging content.

This has led to issues queueing for content on Home Worlds, as you lose a lot of functions if you decide to Data Center Travel. This link here shows you the limitations.

Even when I've queued for a raid series on my home world when I wanted to see how long it'd take for me to get through normally on some of the instances people hate, and it wound up being 2 HOURS for it. One of the more recent ones I went through was Weeping City of Mhach, which caused a lot of issues.

I had to shout in Limsa to even get people to join since it takes forever it seems to get in.

This then creates a major issue for new players who haven't heard of the Data Center Travel system(as the game DOES NOT point you to do such). While they can do other things while waiting, having to wait 2 hours to get into a singular raid to progress the story for the raid series is frustrating and at most will turn people off even trying them even if they're required for Alliance Raid roulette.

It goes to show that even in normal content, Aether literally just takes precedence in every respect due to the massive amount of the NA playerbase congregating in one area. Sure, it's great and all, but what's happening is that you're inconveniencing others on your own Home Worlds. Sure, you may not care about the Marketboard or anything else, but it's giving sprouts a hard time doing that content they want to try.

As for an actual solution? The Cloud.

Yes, The Cloud Test. It's showed it can handle heavy stress, and I think it's high time that SE made it to where if you want to queue for content, they put that Cloud to use for instance servers so people can actually get into things and not wait forever. While I'd imagine it'd take a lot to get the infrastructure up, we desperately need Cross DC Duty Finder in order to fix this issue and get people to go back to their Home Worlds so that the respective DCs(Crystal, Primal, DYNAMIS) aren't always pressured to go to Aether to do content.

[PredatoryCatgirl]

Cross DC parties would be a great addition to this game, assuming the cloud is as stable as it seems to be.

[NekoMataMata]

The Cloud is the solution but I wouldn't be so sure that it can handle heavy stress. It can handle the current population of players flooding the queues, but that's all we really know.


I know some groups held actual events on the servers for different raids, but I don't think that many actually tested the cloud out that much when it came to queueing content. We also don't know if it could handle the surge in population that's going to occur with DT. I still think it's the answer, I just don't think it's ready though.

[Ardeth]

What I think would be cool is if they used the cloud to steal an idea from Wow.

So when you level in Wow, it has a feature called Chromie Time. And what it basically does is you pick an expansion timeline to level in, and you can queue for dungeons from that chosen expansion.

Now, how does that relate to FFXIV?

So there are. I want to say 6 different choices when you use Chromie Time. So that means there are six different dungeon list queues. Now, if you're cleaver enough to catch that, you will have immediately seen the problem. The problem is that you're cutting up the leveling playerbase into 6 different paths. Now Blizzard had a clever solution to that and it was after 5 minutes of waiting with no dungeon it would ask you if you want to either stay in queue or join a new queue where all of the timelines are merged. This means you could get any dungeon, not just the timeline you chose.

Again, what does this have to do with FFXIV?

So, in FFXIV, we have a problem with dead servers. I know I'm on one. What if we can queue for our content on our home server and if we wait like 5 minutes like in Wow ir asks us if we would like to join the cloud queue? And the cloud queue could be like an Aether queue. That way, you don't have to DC travel at all to get content done.

I'm not sure about party finder because I honestly barely use it, but I'm sure if we can link the servers as I have described for random queueing it would lead to cross DC party finder in some way. Again, that isn't something I'm super familiar with.

[Boblawblah]

So, as we all know, Aether has been THE place to gather for anything regarding content in FFXIV - from ranging between Crafting and Gathering, it's been practically the only place where content that isn't MSQ is done. Alliance Raids, Raids in general, and most importantly, EX/Savage/Ultimate.

*Me doing everything (pvp/crafting/gathering/roulettes/MSQ/etc) on Primal*

[Szylver]

*Me doing everything (pvp/crafting/gathering/roulettes/MSQ/etc) on Primal*

I'm on primal and you can notice the difference. You can find duties sooner and faster, you can even stay a few hours longer in aether to do pvp if you can't find frontline matches and you can find way more party finder content.

[Boblawblah]

I'm on primal and you can notice the difference. You can find duties sooner and faster, you can even stay a few hours longer in aether to do pvp if you can't find frontline matches and you can find way more party finder content.

Well, I refuse to be part of the problem then. I like my DC, and I'm going to stay here. Also I'm lazy.

[Ardeth]

Well, I refuse to be part of the problem then. I like my DC, and I'm going to stay here. Also I'm lazy.

That's kinda where I am at. Though I am going to move to another DC. I tried not to leave Dynamis, but nobody else is staying here. It's easy to take a high ground of "I'm not leaving!" And then everyone leaves, and the queues are dead. I was thinking about Primal so as not to make the Aether problem worse.

[Jojoya]

Yes, The Cloud Test. It's showed it can handle heavy stress, and I think it's high time that SE made it to where if you want to queue for content, they put that Cloud to use for instance servers so people can actually get into things and not wait forever. While I'd imagine it'd take a lot to get the infrastructure up, we desperately need Cross DC Duty Finder in order to fix this issue and get people to go back to their Home Worlds so that the respective DCs(Crystal, Primal, DYNAMIS) aren't always pressured to go to Aether to do content.

When did the test show that cloud servers could handle heavy stress?

You mean when my O2 character got stuck on the 01 world for 5 hours starting about 8 hours after the test began because "the target world is currently congested"?

For most of the test, the population online was Dynamis small and that was with having all 4 languages enabled so search results would include the JP players. I don't know how the major stress test toward the end of the week went because they had picked bad hours for the NA population to participate. But I didn't see any signs of the servers getting stressed except the first night when everyone had to keep logging in and out to learn their books and that kept the queue times long.

As far as I know, the only thing the stress test confirmed was that East Coast players experienced less latency when they connect with servers located on the East Coast.

I'm on primal and you can notice the difference. You can find duties sooner and faster, you can even stay a few hours longer in aether to do pvp if you can't find frontline matches and you can find way more party finder content.

Out of curiosity, how does it compare to pre- data center travel? At this point, we would expect everything to tilt toward Aether because of the traffic but how does it compare to the Primal queue times and ability to find a PF before data center travel was possible?

[HyperiusUltima]

Queue Times across the board for important trials in Shadowbringers have been ABYSMAL. Sure, that's what the Duty Support System is for in Dungeons, but when you get to important Trials like Titania, Innocence, and Hades? The Q Times are ass.

As for the Cloud Test, a lot of that stress was on the Lobby Server. I poked in there for a couple days and I could see that Q Times and Instance Stability on the Cloud was here and there at times when it came to ability execution, but it still was stable in terms of boss mechanic execution. Again, this is why they need to build the infrastructure to support the Cloud and use it for Duty/Dungeon/Trial Instances. You'd still have physical servers available for it, but I still think the Cloud is an answer.

As for pre-DC Travel, your individual DCs actually had their own cultures. Primal was essentially a DC where the Brazil community resided, and just about any Q during Shadowbringers wasn't as dead as they are now. Hell, even getting into Mhach wasn't as much of a wait time as I posted above. At most it would take somewhere around 30m for the Roulette people to fill it or get others that still needed it. It's night and day now when you have everyone congregating on Aether.